Life in the Death Lane
by down south
Summary: "There's nothing really wrong with us, is there? We're just a little sick is all." Warning: incest.


**Disclaimer:** S. E. Hinton owns "The Outsiders," and I own OCs.  
><strong>Author's Note:<strong> AU. Flames welcome. Rated M for incest. If the content upsets you, turn back now. Reviews would be fantastic. Ideally, this is going to be a trip down memory lane, showing why Curly and Angela are the way they are. Please remember the moral right of this author has been asserted.  
><strong>Dedication:<strong> For Chase, because she's always loved me when I can't.

* * *

><p><em>November, 1968<em>

"How'd we get so lousy?" Angie asked me, tapping the ashes from our joint right onto the balcony. She smiled a smile and laughed a laugh that only she could. "Lousy ol' Shepard kids."

Late afternoon yellow was all over everything. Angie looked like she belonged miles and miles away from here, the poor girl. It was really too bad she was so stuck, so sucked in by the city. She'd never go nowhere, hopeless little thing that she was, because she kept running around, mucking her dirty little fingers all over Tulsa's black book. It had gotten her real fucking good, and I didn't think she knew that like her big brother, like me, she was nothing. That was all we'd ever be, completely lost, completely nothing.

She had to know. I could remember when we were little, and she always seemed to be drowning in that big black sea of hair, wondering why the hell everyone else was something except the two of us. Tim's shadow had always swallowed us whole, swallowed everyone and everything that ever stood in his way. I didn't know how to get to his level of _something, _and I thanked my lucky stars every day that Angie was smart enough not to care.

"We're pretty well off, Ange," I told her, watching her blow these little smoke rings into the air, _puff, puff, puff. _"It could be worse—we could be dead."

It was November. I inhaled deeply, eyes closed, letting all the cold move through me. Tim always said that you were something if you had people that gave a shit about you. Being alone was having nothing, being nothing.

I had Angela. She was a tough little shit, the grease-hag, and she was a good girl, way deep down past being catty and an overgrown brat. Put her faith in her family—in me, and in Tim, and even in the twin dipshits. And maybe she even had faith in Winston, and Marty, and Lee. They were all as good as family, maybe better. She gave them all something, whatever the hell it was, even if she couldn't give it to herself.

"I don't mind bein' lousy." She nudged me and breathed sweet smoke into my face. "Don't mind not one bit."

"Pride's a sin, Angel," I said, taking the joint from her and inhaling until I thought I'd fucking pop.

"All we got's our pride," she told me, looking out over shanty roof tops and bare branches. "All anybody's got is their pride, and it's fucking upsetting, Curly."

We were all going to hell, each and every one of us. Our old lady was already there, already burning, and we weren't far behind her.

"It could be so wonderful…" She leaned up against the railing, gripping it tightly in her gloved hands. Her breath steamed in front of her mouth. "What are the colors of fall?"

"Red and orange."

"Wrong." She jammed her hands into her pockets. "Yellow."

"I love you, Angie."

She grinned and turned to me. Her teeth were chattering, _click, click, click,_ and I let the joint burn in the ashtray. My sister was a stray cat, taking what she could, always aloof, always slinking around like she didn't really know where to go. She was a motherless child, looking for love, looking for somewhere to belong. There was something missing from those big blue eyes of hers that left an empty little hollow where all her demons swam around. They were the same demons our old lady used to have, the same ones that ate her raw and left her to rot at the mercy of the elements—and oh how she just loved to hurt. There was something sick about it. All the lousy Shepard kids were sick.

"Love is beautiful." She smiled. "It'll kill you, but it's beautiful."

The whites of her eyes were red. She rocked on her heels, moved her head around slowly like it was too heavy for her neck. The cold was biting at me with thousands of tiny frozen metal teeth. It was easy to forget what love felt like. Angie was my kid sister by three goddamned minutes, but she made me feel old. There was a light that burned in her and she was in love with the things that killed mankind.

"I'll always love you, Curly," she said, beaming. She wiped her nose on her glove and lit herself a smoke. "You, and Tim, and the dipshits, but you especially."

It was wrong to have a favorite sibling. I used to think that Tim was mine. Swore up and down that one day I'd be just like him, or I'd be better, because I'd be everything he was and everything he wasn't. That wasn't the way life worked. I could be Tim Shepard, or I could be Curly Shepard, but I couldn't fucking be both. In all our seventeen years, Angie had never tried to be anybody but herself, never ran around trying to be everybody the way me and Tim did.

I sat down at the table, looking at the frost all over the top of it. "It's too bad."

She plopped herself down and pulled my raggy old shoes into her lap. "Whuddaya think Tim'll do if he knows?" She laughed, walking her fingers along my leg. "He deserves to be the favorite. That's what really makes us lousy."

Tim wouldn't give two shits one way or the other because he wasn't here to be liked; he wasn't here to be anything other than goddamned Tim Shepard, the greasy fuck.

"Tim loves you, Angela," I said, watching the leaves bend and break in the wind. "He's a prick, sure as fuckin' hell, but he loves you."

There was frost all over everything. The nights got so cold without the heat on that I thought I'd lose my fingers or toes, wake up to the tips of them purple and blue one morning. Had to boil water in huge ol' pots and dump them into the bathtub to stay clean. The pipes were going to freeze and burst. Gotten colder faster this year. We were in for one hell of a winter.

"Are you sick of feelin' yet?" I reached down into one of my pockets and waved a little plastic baggy in her face, grinning. The white powder bounced around like cocaine snow. "Sometimes, I get so sick of feelin'."

She huffed a laugh, shaking her head, and I let her take the baggy from me. Watched her cut these perfect little lines onto the table, because shooting up made her feel dirty when she thought about it too long. I didn't care; at least we were something when we were dirty. She put her elbow on the table and her cheek in her hand, looking at me. Something burned in her so bright sometimes that it was hard to look back.

"I could cry," she told me, and I laughed because Angela Shepard had never so much as sniffled in all her life. "If I knew how to cry, Curly, I would."

When all the Shepard kids were dead, the only thing anybody would be able to say about any of us was that we didn't know how to cry. The capacity for the emotions that made us human, made us functional, had never quite made it into our fucked up little strands of DNA. Angela hadn't cried when the old lady slit her wrists wide open, or when Tim got hauled in, or when the old man put his hands on her. And when we were younger, she'd never cried over scraped knees, or monsters under the bed, or the fights our parents had, or when we stayed with those fantastic Fox boys for weeks on end because home was hell and driving us crazy.

Sometimes I wondered if she let anything affect her at all, if she even felt at all. Poor Angie Shepard had a great big gaping hole where her heart should've been.

I itched my nose on my sleeve and grinned. If she ever did learn how to cry, it'd be a cold day in hell before she ever let herself. There was no telling what would happen if she did. I imagined it would be like finding out everything I thought I knew was a giant lie. Gods would fall and the earth would split open; the universe would break and the cosmos would shift; the sky would come down on our heads in big blue pieces, and her tears would fill up every lake and every ocean, and everybody would drown, and it would all be so fucking astronomical.

"We're getting sloppy," she said, pulling a dollar bill from her wallet and rolling it up. "All anybody has to do anymore is look at us, we're so sloppy and obvious."

"Fuck sakes, Angela." I rubbed my eyes, heart pulsing molten blood. "Nobody knows a goddamned thing."

She didn't say anything, hesitating briefly and flashing her pretty little teeth at me. "There ain't enough salt in the ocean."

She rolled the bill and stuck the end of it up her nose. I watched her vacuum up three lines of the old man's coke to herself, watched her inflate as it swirled through her system. Her eyes gleamed dark and watery in her face, and she put her cheek in her hand again, rubbing her nose.

"Do you miss Ma?"

I scratched the back of my neck, staring at her. Nobody talked about our mom, never so much as brought up her name or mentioned her in passing. It was like she'd never existed, like she wasn't the woman who'd given birth to us. There was so much bullshit we tried to block out, tried to forget, because if we didn't, we were putting nails in our coffins. Sometimes the old lady's ghost crept up on me, though; sometimes I couldn't forget no matter how hard I tried, because Angela was so much like her.

"What?"

She grabbed my face and stared right at me. "Do you miss Ma, Curly?" she asked again, slowly, like she thought I couldn't fucking understand English. "Do you think about her at all?"

I didn't know how in the hell to answer that. Angie's gloved hands were warm against my skin. I didn't know why in the hell she wanted to talk about the old lady. She'd been physically dead for three years, mentally since long before Angie and I were born.

"You lay with the fucking dogs, Charley," she said, pushing me away and standing up when I didn't answer her. The wind kicked her hair in a black frenzy around her head. "There's nothing really wrong with us, is there? We're just a little sick is all."

"You're crazy, baby," I said, reaching for her. She collapsed into my lap and flung her wiry arms around my neck.

"We're all a little crazy."

Angie was the fucking Pied Piper of the crazies. I felt like one of her rats, following her around until one day she took me right over the edge with her. She was only picking up where the old lady had left off.

She kissed my jaw softly, and I could feel her hot breath. "You're too obvious, Curly, too sloppy."

Maybe I was. I fingered through her hair, sighing. She made me feel like I couldn't keep up with the world, with the way it moved and changed all the goddamned time. The fires of hell were waiting to consume me. I knew she was afraid I'd leave her, find someone else, but it was the primal, instinctive need for breast and nipple—_her _breast and nipple—that kept me coming back. As long as I wanted that, I'd want her.

"This ain't forever, Angie," I said. "Nothin' is."

"Except us." She was beaming again, her teeth gleaming cold and steel. "In one way or another, Charley, we _are _forever."


End file.
